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Development Tools Database Foundations Joining Relational Data Between Tables in SQL Joining Tables and Aliasing

Posted by Adiv Abramson
Adiv Abramson
6,919 Points

Why use an alias for genres.name? Isn't using a keyword as a column name bad practice?

Instead, why not assign the "name" column in the genres table a more descriptive title like "genre" or "genre_name"?

1 Answer

Iain Simmons
MOD
Iain Simmons
Treehouse Moderator 32,305 Points
Iain Simmons
Iain Simmons
Treehouse Moderator 32,305 Points

name doesn't seem to actually be a reserved word. names is in some SQL languages.

https://www.petefreitag.com/tools/sql_reserved_words_checker/?word=name https://www.petefreitag.com/tools/sql_reserved_words_checker/?word=names

But since it's aliased as genre_name, that seems sufficient.

It probably would be best to make things more descriptive to avoid any conflicts though. I know that it's common to do that for ID fields, instead of having a field in every table called id.